By Daoud Kuttab

Reforming and regulating Jordan’s media appears to be one of the priorities of the administration of Samir Rifai who is considered a friend of many Jordanian journalists, editors and publishers.

As in all efforts that seek greater freedom for the press, two global issues must always be remembered. One is that press people abhor legislation, no matter how reformist it might appear. Global press freedom defenders repeatedly call for less legislation and more self regulation. The other is that governments, no matter what their motivation is, are never very good at producing quality and professional media content. These principles might appear to leave very little for the Rifai’s administration to work with, but the reality is much different.

As a thoughtful article written by a colleague showed, the Jordanian Government can do much to improve the media industry without creating additional laws. Instead, a number of distortions in the existing Press and Publications Law, and the Audio Visual Law need to be removed.
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RAMALLAH – Television penetration in Palestine is nearly 100 percent. Almost every home-no matter how poor the family-has a tube in its sitting room. Television viewership is higher than average amongst Palestinians for two main reasons: Because of the continuing conflict, people feel the need to watch television to keep up with the events in the news that directly affect their lives. Also, with high levels of insecurity and troubles outside the home, the television is often the only source of entertainment.

But although Palestinian families spend many hours a day glued to their TV sets, original Palestinian children’s programming is almost non-existent. Instead, hours of dubbed Japanese and other types of cartoons fill the airwaves, especially in key children’s viewing hours. Such dubbed programming usually falls into one of three potentially disadvantageous categories; it is dubbed into classical Arabic (in order to ensure sales in all 23 Arab countries), it consists of imported programming with violent content, or it revolves around religious themes.
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